Fast-paced change: How beef can keep up

With a smartphone in your pocket, today you have access to more information than Bill Clinton had for the entire time he was president of the United States.

The bosses of major motor vehicle companies believe within 20 years it will be illegal for humans to drive on a highway.

Technologies are arriving in droves, and advancing at blink-of-an-eye pace, so much so that things we hadn’t even heard of yesterday will likely be the norm next week.

As astonishing as some of these accelerated technologies is the fact that experts are specialising in studying technological rates of change, exponential growth curves and price performances.

What they are unearthing could well have major implications for agriculture.

A leader in the field, United States-born Kaila Colbin says it’s not about what technology is available at any given point in time, the critical thing is how technology changes over time.

The core message she has for the primary producer is you can no longer use the past to predict future.

Speaking at the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association conference in Alice Springs recently, Ms Colbin provided the above thought-provoking snippets.

She went to explain the law of accelerated returns in computing this way: Today for $1000 you can buy the number of instructions per second that a mouse brain can process.

Experts believe by 2023 for $1000, you will be able to buy the number of instructions per second a human mind can process.

By 2049, $1000 will buy you the number of instructions processed by all human brains on the planet combined.

The “doubling phenomenon” applies to any technology once it becomes information-enabled, Ms Colbin said.

Photography is a classic example.

What was once dependent on physical film, then become “dependent on ones and zeros” and immediately followed a doubling in price performance.

The first digital camera had a resolution of .01 megapixels. Today you can get a 41 megapixel camera as part of a smart phone.

Computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotech, nanotech, gene sequencing, neuroscience - these are all following doubling curves, all being powered by information.

“Our brains are not wired for this,” Ms Colbin said.

“We evolved to understand a lion could run from one end of a room to the other, not from here to the other end of the moon.

“As a result, experts continue to predict linear no matter how much evidence we have to the contrary.

“But the difference between something following a linear projectorary and a doubling curve is insane.”

Ms Colbin is the Australian ambassador for what is known as the Singularity University, a US-based “think tank” that focuses on exponential technologies.

She says she does this work in a bid to prevent the “it came out of nowhere, there is no way we could have known” situation.

“When we see doubling curves, we have to be systematic in our analysis of them if we want to have any hope of responding effectively,” she said.

Check out the price curves for beef and chicken as opposed to bioengineered meat.

A gradual linear upward rise for the first but for the second, a different scale altogether has to be used.

The first data point comes in at $2.3m per kilogram, the second just under $40,000 and the third $80.

Does anybody doubt that price will continue to come down?

The cattle industry’s choices, as Ms Colbin sees it, are to either embrace what is happening in the alternative protein space or “go hard out in another direction.”

“Don’t be the food bowl of Asia, be the delicatessen,” she said.

“Not just organic, but complete traceability and really tell the story.

“The only thing not an option is standing still.”